In about fifteen minutes this story went from being 9th to 100th. There's no way it could have tripped the flamewar detector as there were only two comments when I wrote this, and the ranking fell so fast it could not possibly have been natural voting:<p><a href="https://hnrankings.info/40619561/" rel="nofollow">https://hnrankings.info/40619561/</a><p>For those who don't know: the mods have story kill/boost function which will either nerf the story into the ground or boost it well beyond. It adds in an <i>invisible</i>, sizable positive or negative score.<p>I see no legitimate reason for killing this submission. It wasn't a duplicate: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+meta+fraudulent+ads" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...</a> it's from a long-time, high-karma user, and it was a popular submission with users, climbing rapidly. The story comes from what looks like a legitimate SV-area news site.<p>Someone did it to this story about a DoS vulnerability in NPM that could have stayed with a minor correction to title (changing "javascript" to the more accurate "NPM", although NPM is the defacto package management system so it's debatable): <a href="https://hnrankings.info/40619344/" rel="nofollow">https://hnrankings.info/40619344/</a><p>Same thing happened to a link to the blog for a university research group investigating tiktoc's ranking algorithms (the irony...): <a href="https://hnrankings.info/40619501/" rel="nofollow">https://hnrankings.info/40619501/</a><p>Someone also did it with a negative story about Adobe's software sprouting a new paragraph in its term and conditions that changed a bunch of language around Adobe's rights to access/use user's works: <a href="https://hnrankings.info/40619329/" rel="nofollow">https://hnrankings.info/40619329/</a><p>My guess is that the mod's excuse is that Adobe responded to Mashable stating it doesn't use people's works to train <i>one specific ML system</i>, but that's a snowjob - nothing changed except that now they've pinky-sworn that they won't do what the ToS says they can.<p>This function is clearly being abused and either it needs to be removed, or its use should require that the mod who does it has to enter a reason, and both the username of the mod and the reason are published at the top of the comments page <i>and</i> a marker on the submission list indicates either a score ner or boost by a mod.<p>It's also well past time to remove the flamewar suppressor. It's a sledgehammer that is easily abused; if a company wants to kill a story, all they have to do is get a bunch of accounts to start arguments. It's probably especially easy now that so many people are working remotely, spread out over a large area..